UNDER the stand at the Arezzo football stadium, Italian chef and slow food champion Roberto Abbadati is showboating with desserts. In the background, Carl Craig and his band are thumping out jazzy techno on the main stage at the Arezzo Wave festival but, here, the much acclaimed Taste author is demonstrating his winning way with chocolate.
At this festival, food plays just as important a role as the bands on the various stages. Now in its 20th year, Arezzo's week-long music and arts festival offers many sonic, visual and other sensual thrills to the 200,000 people who pop along to be entertained under the Tuscan skies.
On the music front, the festival has developed a winning knack for mixing rising and established international and Italian names. There's also a popular CultWave fringe featuring comicbook art, cabaret, film, theatre, art installations and cuisine. Be it a screening of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, a reading of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 in its entirety, a performance from Kenyan acrobats, a set from Greg Dulli's Twilight Singers or the hugely entertaining Elettrowave all-night club, Arezzo Wave ticks many boxes.
As a result, Arezzo is ideally poised to benefit from festival tourism. This potentially lucrative new-school tourism stream is driven by music fans seeking to swap humdrum, uninspired and lacklustre domestic festivals for a foreign adventure that involves music in the open air and decent amounts of sunshine. As those who run such European festivals as Sonar in Barcelona or Open'er in Poland will have noted from mining their attendance data, Irish music fans, in particular, like to travel in search of sonic bliss.
And who can blame them? Ireland's summer festival calendar may feature about 30 outdoor shows this year, but the fiscal and non-fiscal costs probably outweigh the benefits in the vast majority of cases. Instead of dealing with the uglier side of the Irish festival experience, more and more Irish people are choosing to spend a couple of days abroad listening to music and having a holiday to boot.
If festival tourism is set to be a new strain of new rock'n'roll, Arezzo will only be too glad to say "grazie". The city is situated in the heart of Tuscany so the tourism part is second nature. The festival organisers, meanwhile, now have more than enough experience under their belts after 20 years hard graft to know what will attract an audience. Best of all, thanks to the assistance of local and regional councils and government bodies, admission to the vast majority of events is free of charge.
Musically, there's much to like. By day, it's the future sounds of Italy that regale punters gathered at the stage located within the grounds of a former psychiatric hospital. While a couple of Italian bands have made some inroads abroad (both Linea 77 and Subsonica have starred at Eurosonic), most still retain a strictly local appeal. However, the bleepy, dreamy Morr Music indie-pop of Studio Davoli and the sweeping cello-adorned emo-rock of Entourage possess oodles of overseas potential.
At night, the entire town seems to walk en masse to the home of Serie B team AC Arezzo. Besides Carl Craig, Laurent Garnier with Bugge Wesseltoft, Sinéad O'Connor and ex-Afghan Whig Greg Dulli, newer international names like folk-pop duo Cocorosie, Ukrainian trad-punks Gogol Bordello and Dutch electrobilly rockers zZz make noteworthy and stadium-sized splashes.
The loudest applause is reserved, however, for those acts with already established local appeal. For some reason, former Skunk Anansie yeller Skin is huge in Italy and the stadium gates have to be closed before she goes onstage, such is the crowd that gathers.
Bandarbardó (Italian rock knees-up), Marlene Kuntz (moody, slow-mo alternative epics) and Gianna Nannini (the Italian Pat Benatar, right down to the floppy hair-do and songs which sound like Love Is A Battlefield) are the acts that really get the Italians grooving in the stands.
Meanwhile, the food continues to be dished up left, right and centre. In a perfect world, let's hope that all festival fare would be like this.
Further information from www.arezzowave.com
jimcarroll@irish-times.ie
